At first, I didn’t think I would like State of Decay 2. If you’ve spent any time around here at all, you know the depths of my obsession with the original State of Decay. I put in hundreds of hours, most spent in the Breakdown DLC, building and rebuilding my little patch […]
narrative
31 posts
In many games, mental disorders are very much defined as auxiliary to the characters within the game. They are used to derive a sort of mechanic and are ignored narratively as they relate to character development and seriously dealing with these topics. Games like Amnesia, Don’t Starve, and The Evil […]
There has been a lot of discussion over the past week about Ian Bogost’s recent article in The Atlantic entitled, “Video Games are Better Without Stories,” an article in which Bogost argues, ultimately, exactly what his title says–that is, that the idea of games seeking to tell stories is an […]
Last week, Austin Walker wrote about endings over at Waypoint, focusing not only on literal game endings, but also on letting go. Preparing to return to the world can be a challenge, certainly; I’ve never come back from Trumbull Valley, for instance. But sometimes it’s all too easy to leave […]
Exploratory adventure games, narrative adventures, spatial adventures, environmental adventures, narrative explorations—different, certainly related phrases, all used to describe games that rely heavily on exploration to craft an experiential story. Walking simulators often overlap heavily here, but with games like Her Story, for instance, there’s not much (or any!) walking, so we needed […]
I’ve written about games and stories and the connection between game studies and literary studies in the past, but after continuing to watch Westworld, I find myself coming back to this network of relationships, this interplay between game and story. Because something that Westworld has brought to mind for me […]
We’ve been grappling, the past couple weeks, with a game called Bound, and we’ve been particularly struck by the game’s ambiguous narrative and by its surreal landscapes. And something we continue to ask ourselves is–what is the purpose of the conversation between the two, between the narrative and the gameworld? […]
It’s a long running joke between friends of mine (ok, mostly between Sam and I), that I hate narrative. I skip quest text, I skip cut scenes, and I never look up the lore to a game I play. This semester, however, has thrown me into the narrative deep end. […]
I’m currently working my way through Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves. I’m writing about it here because the book was described to me as feminist science fiction written by a man. I had forgotten that description until I had gotten a little ways into the book, but it came back to me […]
I recently came across an article entitled “Between the Lines: Games and Diegesis,” in which Ian McCamant interrogates the manner in which games tell stories and the manner in which they tell stories differently than literature or film. And since these are subjects I usually find myself engaging with, McCamant’s […]
As a child sick days, for me, meant laying feverishly on the couch at my grandmother’s house watching cartoons on what now seems to be a ridiculously small black and white TV. There was orange juice, chicken soup (or Vernor’s ginger ale if I had a tummy bug), and a […]
It’s starting to feel like fall, which always makes me want to watch scary movies and play creepy games. So, this morning I went looking for a spooky game on Steam, and I found Port of Call, a free to play indie adventure game. I like to play these quick […]
Alisha asked me something earlier this week, and since it’s something that’s been nagging at me since, I figured, hey, maybe it’s about time I write about it in an effort to explore the subject more deeply. The subject at hand is perhaps best introduced in the paraphrasing of Alisha’s […]
As I mentioned during our latest episode of the NYMG podcast, I’ve been playing Until Dawn, and the game has got me thinking about a few different things that I’d like to spend some time parsing through, like the game’s representation of things like gender and race, how it is that […]
The fall semester began last week at Purdue, and I’ve been spending some time this past week catching up with other members of my cohort and meeting with professors to discuss my research goals. And I’ve been thinking about a few things as a result of these conversations—conversations that, of […]
This semester, I’m trying a few different things in the classroom. I’m teaching in, and doing curriculum development for, a specialized program in conjunction with our college of tech, so this fall is all about (reasoned) experimentation. All the first-year writing students in this program are tech students who are all enrolled […]